Tools/guides for making contemporary urban maps

[George Marques]

Hello, I'm lurker around here and always come for reference once in a while. I made two maps in different styles for fictional stories (I should remember to post them here someday).

But now I'm looking for something that I quite didn't find in the Tutorials section. So, to the question already: is there any guidance to make a map of a urban contemporary city?

I want something along the lines of Open Street Map tiles. I've even considered install the server in my machine to make a custom map (though I still didn't find good instructions that does not rely on syncing with the OSM database, but I'll still try that, for I'm a very computer-savvy person). If I could, I'd make an open server like OpenGeoFiction so other people in the project could help me.

I gave up of doing any satellite view and making a street map seems easy with some vector graphics editor, like Inkscape, but I don't have the knowledge to make the paths look like in a "real" map.

If anyone could point me to some material on how to do it I'd very glad.

Thanks is advance (and in retrospect for all the tutorials I already used).